Q21UB Wiki
='Welcome to the Special Topics in Communications: Networks Q21UB Wiki'= Instructions The final project (required only from the graduate students) is a student-selected research project that applies networking principles in our everyday applications by looking at how our world is connected socially, strategically and technologically and why it matters. In other words you need to propose a Q21 similar to the 20Q to be covered in this course that utilizes networking concepts to address the proposed question. The proposal should be 1-2 pages and should provide a detailed description of the question you are trying to address. You should convince the reader that the problem addressed plays a significant role in our networked life. You should also state what you plan to deliver at the end of the project. You should include a short list of references that are related to your project. If it is a joint project, you should state the planned division of work. I will give you feedback on your proposal. Be careful not to propose an overly ambitious project since everything must be done within the semester. The final project could be a collaborative project with at most two students. If a collaborative project is pursued, the scope of the project is expected to be about twice that of a one-student project, and the works of each student must be clearly stated so that I can grade them separately. Start immediately with your project! Think about what you want to do. You are encouraged to discuss with the instructor about your plans.. Wiki page You need to create a wiki page for your proposed Q21. It should be similar format to the course book chapters but not included the advanced materials. In your wiki page you need to create 2 examples with solutions similar to the ones in the 20Q textbook. ='Question 21'= How can I trust a digital transaction made using Bitcoins? by Enrico Santagati Bitcoin (BTC), is a decentralized digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer internet protocol and it was introduced in 2009 by a pseudonymous developer named Satoshi Nakamoto. Today, Bitcoin is the most widely used alternative currency and already a few hundreds of companies and individuals are accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment. Nevertheless, Is Bitcoin robust and efficient enough to be used as an every-day currency? Read the Full Article How does my GPS determine my route? by Colleen Bailey We often take for granted how easy it is to navigate today. Many people have handheld GPS devices and even more have a smart phone with GPS capability. All you need is a destination point and you can receive step by step guidance from your current location. Read the Full Article How do matching sites do the matching? by Xiangyu Chen A matching problem can be formulated by the Stable Marriage problem.(One of the classic matching problem), and it can be formulated by the stable fixture problem. The stable fixtures (SF) problem is a generalization of the stable roommates (SR) problem (a detailed treatment of which can be found in which each participant has a fixed capacity, and is to be assigned a number of matches less than or equal to that capacity subject to the normal stability criterion. Read the Full Article How to Capture the Zeitgeist via Eigen-tweets? by Emrecan Demirors, Panos Markopoulos Twitter is an online social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its registered users to send and read text messages, so called "tweets", of up to 140 characters. Tweets can be posted through the website interface, SMS , or a range of apps for mobile devices. The service gained rapidly worldwide popularity. As of 2012 there were over 500 million registered users, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. Since its launch in July 2006, Twitter has become one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". Arguably, this enormous daily load of tweets largely encapsulates the worldwide emerging trends and breaking news and, in the past few years, tweet trend-clustering and geo-temporal trend tracking (a.k.a. zeitgeist tracking) has attracted considerable interest. Read the Full Article How can GPS devices be tracked from anywhere in the world? by Adam Gannon The Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) is a digital communication system for real-time information exchange between amateur radio users in a local area. Now over 30 years old the network has grown to accomidate 40,000 users. A complex web of digital repeaters and internet connected relay stations allows users to transmit data packets, the most common type being GPS position, well beyond the range of a conventional radio. In a network such as this, how do we manage congestion while giving each user the chance to reliably transmit as much data as they need to? What are the challenges encountered and solutions presented with maintaining this unique network? Read the Full Article How does Pandora differentiate my musical taste? by Luigi Di Tacchio, Zahed Hossain Pandora is probably the most famous web radio of Internet. The way it works is simple: the user gives an initial set of bands or songs he likes and Pandora suggests him new songs he could like, updating its knowledge using feedbacks received from the user. Which are the principles Pandora uses to select those new songs? Is this system really accurate? Does it have any problems? And if it does, how can they be solved? We will try to answer to these questions and analyze the way Pandora guesses users’ musical taste with success. Read the Full Article Why the current 4G is much faster than the previous generations? by Zimu Guo Today, everyone need a connection to the internet. People both need to learn news from the internet and to watch video for entertainment. Considering none wants to wait for minutes to read one slide of news and for hours to buffer a movie. A technology which can provide a high transmission rate is needed on edge. 4G connection is such a technology which can provide a downlink speed up to 1 Gbits/s. Such a high rate can be achieved by implementing MIMO technology. MIMO system is the used widely today to provide a high speed data transmission. The use of multiple transmitting and receiving antennas can provide high spectral efficiency and link reliability for point-to-point communication in fading environments. The difference between SISO and MIMO system compared here is the BER (bit error rate). The lower BER, the better transmission rate. With the same energy constrain, the system with lower BER can achieve a higher transmission rate which we can say the data transmission is faster. Read More What is the technology behind Google and why people choose Google instead of Bing? by Mona Nafari When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using keywords), the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. Read the Full Article What’s the deal with Internet rush hour? by Robert Ward, John Inzina Internet rush is hour is a result of increased demand for service, which in turn increases the queuing delay for all users in the network. When a request reaches a busy server, it must wait until all requests with higher priority are serviced first, then wait for its own service time. Queuing theory is a mathematical analysis used to model the network and ensure quality of service (QoS) for the paying customers. Users are only willing to tolerate a certain amount of delay, so network designers must balance the ability to service requests at a resonable rate during periods of high demand, while not wasting money on extra hardware that sits idol during long periods of low demand. The desired parameters are subjective but the mathematical analysis of the queuing system is an important tool for designing networks. Read the Full Article Is Cloud Computing Green? by Nan Cen, Peiran Song ---- Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Green cloud computing, refers to environmentally sustainable computing. Murugesan defines the field of green computing as 'the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using and disposing of computers, servers and associated subsystems - such as monitors, printers, storage devices and networking and communication systems - efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment'. Read the Full Article Why do I pay 7.99$ monthly for Netflix? by Sunit Kapuria, Cédric Lolliot Thanks to the new generation of cloud computing, video-on-demand (VoD) providers such as Netflix and Hulu have based their resources on the Cloud and they make reservations for bandwidth guarantees at negotiable prices to support continuous media streaming. How much each VoD provider has to pay for bandwidth reservation and how the bandwidth price is evaluated ? Read more... How Does Facebook News Feed Work? by Khoi Nguyen, Viral Patel Facebook was created originally in Harvard by Mark Zuckerberg with its sole purpose to share pictures and class notes within Harvard students. However, it quickly expanded and became one of the most social visit sites today. Almost everyone, especially students from middle school to college to working business people have at least one Facebook account. With its expansion, each Facebook user eventually has added from hundreds to thousands of friends. Read the Full Article Did Facebook Wipe Out Orkut or was it Google Itself? by Rachana Nikum, Pragya Tiwari From the beginning of mankind, making the right choice has been quite a task. Whether it is a choice between choosing the right weapon for hunting, or the right kind of movie on a Saturday night, the right Social Networking Site (SNS), which not only helps us connect with the world, but is also secure and maintains our social and personal integrity. We have seen an interesting history of Social Networking Sites, from Orkut, the inception of SNSs on a global level, to Facebook, which within a year of its launch became a tough competitor to Orkut, to Google+, which people think, was launched as a backup to restore the user database, in case Google Inc. might have to ‘shut down Orkut’! Read the Full Article How can Social Media like Twitter be used to predict future events like elections? Alesha Patel, Meghna Vaidya :: We start by looking at the existing methodologies for measuring the beliefs and intentions of individuals, for example market surveys and polls. These polls have a number of disadvantages related to them in terms of cost, time and human effort involved. But thanks to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook etc.; we have a large amount of information available on the internet about every topic, or major events or happenings in different parts of the world- in the form of people’s sentiments on the social media sites. The intuitive idea is to utilize this user generated information to produce the results which are traditionally published using surveys and polls.This is a challenging task. We need to ensure that our sample has representative distribution. We have to take into account the sentiments in the user-generated content. Amongst all these factors, we have one feature in our favor – Wisdom of Crowds. 'The concept of wisdom of crowds tells us that the error reduces by a factor as large as the crowd when we average the estimates first. But we have to take into account a lot of other factors, along with Wisdom of Crowds. 'Read the Full Article :: How does Google Maps make our life easy? by Rachita Patrikar, Sivaram Rajendhran All of us would have used google map atleast once and enjoyed its luxury. So we know that Google map does make our life easy. But the question is how? This question can be answered by providing some necessary mathematical back ground and relating them with networks and day to day life terminologies. Read the Full Article How VRCodes reboot smartcodes? by Georgios Sklivanitis VRCodes (Video-Response Codes) introduce a novel visible light-based communications architecture based on unobtrusive and undetectable by the human eye embedded codes in a picture, that are easily resolved by an inexpensive off-the-self camera. Current planar markers are visually obtrusive to the human viewer, and their design occupies valuable physical space when either more information needs to be embedded or when need to be read from long distances. Can we transmit machine-compatible data as well as provide relative orientation without being obtrusive? VRCodes answer the question by offering a new active visual tagging solution which is based on the fact that active visible surfaces appear different to a camera than to the human eye. They present the design and implementation of an active tag which utilizes all dimensions of color, time and space, is decodable using a 15fps rolling-shutter camera and enables data to be rendered invisibly on a display. Read the Full Article How do travel sites recommend hotels?: Multi-dimensional Recommender Systems by Marcia Torrico The need for Multi-dimensional Recommender Systems Travel recommender sites are a very valuable tool for a traveler not only because they synthesize the available abundant pre-trip information but also they allow a more reliable decision process for the user Jannach D., Gedikli F., Karakaya Z., and Juwig O.,” Recommending hotels based on multi-dimensional customer ratings”. Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2012, pp 320-331.. Traditional applications of Recommender Systems (RS) such as a movie or a book recommendation, allow users to provide only one overall rating for each movie. For instance, Netflix users will rate the movie on a scale from 1 to 5 and no other individual characteristic ratings i.e story, graphics, etc., are possible. When it comes to recommending hotels, this one-dimensional RS is not enough since travelers will look to stay in hotels with specific amenities. These criteria will depend on the interests of each user and can range from friendly customer service to including ocean activities packages. Therefore, Multi-dimensional (multi-criteria) Recommender Systems are not only a great fit for recommending hotels but also they can potentially improve traditional one-dimensional RS due to its flexibility to account for ratings of specific details of an item. Read the Full Article Read the Full Article Does it matter how far you are in a virtual world network? by Krutish Venkataraman Distance has always played a major role in influencing the ways in which we organize our personal relationships and collaborations. Still, in the past century, the limiting effect of distance has seemed to gradually fade due to advances in transportation and telecommunication technologies such as railroads, cars, planes, and the telephone. These advances have helped build connections among spatially dispersed individuals. In the past two decades, with globalization and wide usage of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), like the Internet and mobile phones, have brought deep changes in the forming of communication networks in work and social settings. With ICTs, the constraints of physical distance on human interaction are eliminated. Work in distributed form has become a common form of collaboration, Both within and beyond organizational boundaries. At the same time, in the social sphere, Technology-supported social networks which connect friends and relatives close and afar are slowly replacing traditional place-bound neighborhood communities. These notable changes in the society have led to the belief of “the death of the distance” and “the world is flat”. In spite of the improvement in advanced information and communication technologies that have increased our capability of interacting and collaborating with people across greater distances, many argue that distance “…would persist as an important element in human experience”. This is because the ICTs are unable to emulate the unique characteristics of face-to-face interactions. Read the Full Article How Google search Engine searches whatever I want? by Mahmuda Zafrin There are lot of search engines in our web system. Among all of them Google got the first place. About 69.1% people are using google where 30.9%users are using others such that MSN, Yahoo etc.Page Rank developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It is first as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine.That project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype in 1998.Page ranking is actually the heart of the Google search engin. So that in the later portion I try to focus on page ranking. Read the Full Article Why do Internet Exchange Points Play a Fundamental Role in the Internet Ecosystem? by Mirko Gradillo When you use the Internet, what happens? Whether you go online to chat with you friends, or watch a video on YouTube, or send an email, or buy a book on Amazon, or check the weather on AccuWeather, or search a topic on Wikipedia, it feels like there is one wire connecting you directly to the thing you want. But a billion other people may be connected to a billion other things at the same time. How can that happen? This is possible making agreements. Read the Full Article Disclaimer This wikia page is created for a class project. The owner of the Q21UB Wiki page is not responsible for any of the material posted by the students. dsfsdf Category:Browse Category:2.21 What is the technology behind Google and why people choose Google instead of Bing or other search engines?